Imagine...

"Imagine all the people...living for today..."
--John Lennon.

I'm quite sure that most people today consider John Lennon's iconic song "Imagine" to be little more than a naive and utterly impossible hippie fantasy, a piece of nostalgia to be indulged now and then, or, for some, a dangerous socialistic, heretical screed...another reason to stamp out "godless liberalism."

But I love this song for another, unlikely reason: because it is a luminous description of reality.  What??? you ask. Consider:

• In actuality, there is no Heaven or Hell. These are not actual "places" we somehow fly to (or descend to) after death, but metaphors, at best, for states of mind.
• In actuality, all the people do live for today, whether they know it or not. The past is gone and irretrievable; the future is just a mental formation, an imaginative projection. Neither actually exists--only the present moment does.
• In actuality, there are no countries--the view from space discloses no actual borders between nation states. Nations, likewise, are collectively held mental formations.
• In actuality, there are no possessions. Everything we "own" (including our own bodies) is just a temporary configuration of causes and conditions in transit between us and someone or something else, and is a product of ongoing interactions with their exterior. Without everything in the universe, there would not be anything in the universe--this is because that is, and vice versa, and all is in constant flux and transformation.

But what about "No religion too"? This is the line that provokes the most heated reactions, quite naturally. ("See? I told you--he is a Godless Commie who wants to suppress God's people," I can hear the right-wing zealots scream.)

In the spirit of the rest of the lyrics, I would suggest that Lennon is saying, or at least we can interpret, that no one religion has a patent on Truth; that it is "nothing to kill or die for."  And likewise, as with no Heaven, no Hell, and no national borders, and no real possessions, there is no such thing as "religion" in the real world--that is, in the "inescapable network of mutuality" that is Gaia. Religion, likewise, is a mental formation, without any actual counterpart in the real world.

That being the case, let's do a bit more imagining. Imagine what might happen if...

• a Dharma Gaia movement took root, simply because people discovered the joy of meditating, and the mental and spiritual wholeness and joy of aligning the health, competence and resilience of their own bodies, minds, and spirits with that of their communities and their planet, and because none of this threatened their existing religious beliefs. The movement would not be a religion; there is no mandatory ideology. At its core is basic meditation practice, common throughout wisdom traditions of the world: Breathe - Observe - Let Go - Abide. To this it adds learning to identify oneself with one's community and planet simultaneously--or as Lao Tzu put it, "Taking care of everything (and everyone) and abandoning nothing (and no one)."
• Dharma Gaia circles started springing up everywhere, adapted for the local culture--in schools, churches, synagogues, community centers, even places of work, simply because people enjoyed the practice, and derived such personal and social benefits of doing so. (In Christian churches, for example, where the word "Dharma" is often considered heresy and "Gaia" as a pagan earth deity to be stamped out, one could simply call it "the mustardseed project" after the Parable of the Mustard Seed.) There would be no Dharma Gaia hierarchy, no enforcement of orthodoxy, but there would be ongoing communication, through the Web, of ideas and best practices for healing self, community, and planet simultaneously among all the various self-organizing circles. Its iconography will be simply the photo-image of the Earth, which has already gone viral all over the planet.
• As a direct consequence, local farm markets, tree-planting cooperatives, and garden cooperatives started springing up in communities throughout the world, as people reclaimed their food and healed the land, rivers, and topsoil that provides it.
• In any instances where Glomart perversely persists in lucrative efforts to plunder the planet and enslave its inhabitants (i.e. clearcutting forests, mountaintop removal mining, fracking, blood diamonds, overfishing, etc.) Gaians would plan and execute focused and relentless Satyagraha campaigns to disrupt their despoliation, while simultaneously restoring democracy from the ground up by mobilizing voters to throw Glomart-owned politicians out of office, through a widespread Campaign for the Public Interest.
• The net effect of all such efforts would be Spontaneous Remission of the Cancer of the Earth--a global culture where everyone was well aware that humanity is a part of, not apart from Gaia, and therefore everyone is committed to honoring and nurturing the biological conditions of our existence--topsoil, air, water, and sunlight;  that "possessions" are borrowed temporarily from Gaia, not owned; that "countries" are simply administrative conveniences, and nothing to kill or die for; and that "religions" are fine as social cohesives, provided they reject toxic "my way or no way" ideologies. A world, in short, where it is common knowledge, as William Blake said, that "Everything that lives is holy."